Unable to buy a copy of BK [LWN.net]

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 26, 2004 7:05 UTC (Sun) by Ross (subscriber, #4065)
In reply to: Unable to buy a copy of BK by lm
Parent article: An Interview with Tom Lord of Arch (O'ReillyNet)

But few have a "we won't sell to anyone who employs or has employed
someone who has or has potentially discussed reverse engineering (or
our product(s) or the protocols they use" (not an actual quote from a BM
license or sales person, it's just a characterization of what LM said).

No-reverse-engineering clauses really rub me the wrong way even without
that extra twist.

I'm changing my mind again: no BitKeeper for me, ever.

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Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 26, 2004 11:34 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. I was going to recommend it at work (~1500 seats): I'm certainly not now. It's arch with lots of wrapper scripts for us.

It'll be more annoying for me, but less disruptive than having to have everyone who's ever worked for us watch what they say on every net-accessible source in case we say something that annoys BitMover.

Note: I've said things that have annoyed representatives of Sun, and Oracle, and even Microsoft; I've made it plain that I'm in favour of competitors to Oracle springing up, as well, and the Sun people knew I used Linux. None of them have decided to stop selling me (or the company I work for) things because of it.

(And, yes, my non-lawyer's memory agrees that the no-reverse-engineering clause is not enforceable across the EU, although doubtless the copyright lunatics are bringing in something to reverse that regrettably just state of affairs.)

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 27, 2004 3:42 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

1500 corporate Arch users? There just ain't no way, no matter how many wrapper scripts you write. Arch barely scales to 1/10 that many users right now. Watch the Arch mailing list and IRC and notice the number of merge issues that need to be resolved by hand. It seems a small issue, but with 1500 users, this sort of manual labor will bury you.

You'd best give them a year or two to get the speed up and simplify the merging. Otherwise, you're going to have 1500 people using Arch as nothing more than a poor-man's RCS.

If you do manage to use Arch's features with even 200 corporate developers, please write an article about it! That would certainly be a potent milestone.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 27, 2004 5:12 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

can BK or even Clearcase handle 1500 users working on the same code base? I assume that's what you mean in your message.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Oct 1, 2004 1:04 UTC (Fri) by lm (guest, #6402) [Link]

Yes, BK can handle 1500 users working on the same source base, or pretty close to it. There are about that many people checking stuff into the linux kernel trees. You can check it out on www.bkbits.net but truth in advertising, not all of those users listed are actually using BK, some of them are proxied into the system via patches imported by someone else.

That said, I'm pretty sure there are >1000 actual BK users working on the Linux kernel tree directly. BK uses a lease based model for its licensing which means that those users connect to openlogging.org once a month to get a lease (this all happens in the background, nobody realizes it is there, which is - in my opinion - how a license server should work, I'm not a flexlm fan). We can correlate those with the stuff on bkbits.net and openlogging.org and a 1000 looks to be a lower bound. I think it's quite a bit more than but I haven't worked through all the data to be sure (we have many many GB of logs). So 1500 all on one source base? I don't think we have any commercial users with that many users all working on the same source base, that's pretty atypical anyway, source is usually broken up into chunks with different groups working on different chunks.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 27, 2004 10:47 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

They don't commit that often :) many of them are using it as a distribution mechanism.

But I guess it'll be SVN for now, anyway: it seems that `like CVS' is more important than I thought it was.

Unable to buy a copy of BK

Posted Sep 28, 2004 3:50 UTC (Tue) by Talli (guest, #25044) [Link]

Nix,

I am starting a company with Tom Lord to develop a company around GNU arch. If you would like to chat about how GNU arch can be used at your dev shop, we would be delighted to discuss that with you.

You can reach me at talli-at-seyza.com

Thanks and looking forward to chatting.

Talli